6-Day Yinchuan to Zhongwei with the Bronze Gorge and the 108 Pagodas

Morning - arrival
Yinchuan sits on the flat plain between the Helan Mountains and the Yellow River, at about 1,100 metres, and it is the greenest city for a thousand kilometres in any direction. That is not a natural accident: the plain is irrigated by a canal system that was dug under the Han dynasty and has been maintained, on and off, for two thousand years. Your guide meets you at the airport or the railway station and drives you into the city.

The Ningxia Museum
The provincial museum is the right place to start, because it explains what you are about to look at. The collection runs from the Palaeolithic sites of Shuidonggou through the Tang and Song into the Western Xia - the Tangut kingdom that ruled here from 1038 until the Mongols extinguished it in 1227 - and out along the Silk Road. The Western Xia galleries hold Buddhist sutras, Tangut script, seals, ceramics and the stonework recovered from the imperial tombs, and there is a fine collection of the carved stone steles that the Tangut left behind. Admission is free and pre-booking is required; your guide handles it.

Lunch
Ningxia cooking is Hui cooking: lamb above all, noodles, and a restrained hand with chilli. Your guide orders hand-grabbed mutton, a bowl of lamb soup with pulled noodles, and a plate of the local cold vegetable dishes. A mild table is arranged alongside.

Afternoon - Haibao Pagoda
North of the old city, in a walled courtyard of its own, stands the Haibao Pagoda - a square brick tower of eleven storeys, about fifty-four metres tall, tapering slightly as it rises, with arched niches on each face and no eaves at all. Its present form is a Qing reconstruction of a much older building, traditionally dated to the fifth century, and it is one of the oldest structures standing in the city. The climb to the top platform is steep and narrow and gives you the whole of Yinchuan: the plain, the canals, the mountains closing the western horizon.

Evening
Dinner at a local restaurant. If you have the energy, the guide can walk you through the drum tower area afterwards, which is livelier after dark than it looks by day.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the tomb field
Thirty-five kilometres west of the city, where the plain runs into the foot of the Helan Mountains, is a burial ground of fifty-odd square kilometres holding nine imperial tombs and more than two hundred subsidiary burials. The Western Xia was a Tangut state that held this ground, together with much of modern Gansu and northern Shaanxi, from 1038 to 1227, and it produced its own script, its own coinage and a Buddhist culture that looked west to Tibet as much as east to the Song.

What survives is largely earth: rammed walls, the octagonal cores of the burial mounds, and the long spirit roads running toward the mountains. Seen from a distance the mounds read as eroded pyramids, which is where the tourist name comes from. The setting does most of the work - the tombs face east across the plain with the mountain wall behind them, and the light in the late afternoon turns the whole field amber.

The site museum
The museum at the entrance is the other half of the visit, and it is a good one: Tangut script, Buddhist printing, armour, the gilt bronze ox and the stone horses that came out of the tombs, and a reconstruction of the burial chambers. A short film sets out what is known and - more interestingly - what is not. No Tangut royal tomb has been opened intact, and the architecture of the mounds has never been satisfactorily explained.

Lunch
Lunch at a farmhouse restaurant near the site, where the lamb comes from the surrounding villages and the vegetables are grown against the mountain. Mild options and vegetarian dishes are arranged in advance.

Afternoon
After the museum, the vehicle takes you along the foot of the mountains to the twin tombs at the northern end of the field, where the two mounds stand close together and the crowds do not reach. On the way back, if the group wants it, the guide can stop at a winery on the eastern foothills - this is the same strip of gravel and sunshine that produces most of China's best red wine - for a tasting before dinner.

Evening
Dinner in Yinchuan.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Yinchuan, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the plain
The road from Yinchuan to Zhongwei runs south-west along the Yellow River, through the oldest irrigation district in China. This is the Ningxia plain: flat, bright green, cut into rectangles by canals and lined with poplars, with the desert held back on both sides. The canals are the reason the place exists. The Qin and Han both built here, the Tang expanded the system, and the Western Xia emperors irrigated the same fields.

There are two stops worth making on the way: the Bronze Gorge, where the river has cut a channel through the hills, and the Qingtongxia dam area. Your guide will judge the timing; the drive itself is only two and a half hours and there is no need to rush it.

Lunch
Lunch in Zhongwei, at a restaurant near the old town. Zhongwei is known across the province for its saozi noodles - hand-pulled noodles with a thick lamb and vegetable sauce - and for a local vinegar that is sharp enough to be used as a condiment on its own.

Afternoon - the Gaomiao
The Gaomiao is one of the strangest buildings in China and hardly anyone outside the province has heard of it. It began in the Ming dynasty as a small Buddhist shrine and grew, over three hundred years, into a single structure nearly thirty metres high in which Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist halls are stacked on top of each other, accessed by staircases that climb through the building in the dark. The plan is a compressed cross; the upper storeys are carried on a timber frame with almost no visible support; and the roofscape, seen from the courtyard, is a dense thicket of eaves, ridges and glazed figures.

You climb it. The staircases are narrow, the passages are low, and the whole thing creaks. From the top you look over the old town roofs to the Yellow River and, beyond it, the first line of dunes.

Evening
Dinner in Zhongwei. Overnight in the city, within reach of the desert for tomorrow.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Zhongwei, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the dune wall
Shapotou is a bend in the Yellow River where the Tengger desert, which runs north into Inner Mongolia, comes down to the water in a wall of dunes about a hundred metres high. The river here is wide, slow and green, running between sand on one side and the black rock of the gorge on the other. It is the single most photographed place in Ningxia and it earns it.

The morning is for the desert side. You climb the dune face - on foot, or by the sand escalator the site installed, or on a chairlift - and then the sand sledding runs come down the slope at a speed that is genuinely surprising. Camel trains work the ridge line above. All activities are optional and paid on the spot; your guide will tell you honestly which ones are worth the money.

The straw grids
The reason Shapotou is famous in China has nothing to do with tourism. In the 1950s the railway from Baotou to Lanzhou was being buried by the advancing dune field several times a year, and a group of engineers and local workers solved it with straw: one-metre squares of wheat or rice straw pressed into the sand in a checkerboard, which holds the surface still long enough for grass to establish. The technique, known as the straw checkerboard, was subsequently exported to desert-control projects across northern China and Africa. You can see the grids and the vegetation they carry on the flat ground behind the dunes, and the guide will show you how they are laid.

Lunch
Lunch at a restaurant in the scenic area. Yellow River carp is the local dish; the guide orders it steamed, with a lamb dish and vegetables alongside.

Afternoon - the river
The afternoon is on the water side: the sheepskin raft, which is eight or ten inflated goatskins lashed to a frame and steered by one man with a pole, is the traditional craft of this reach of the river and still works. The gorge walk above the river is quiet and gives you the whole bend. Those who want more adrenaline can take the zip line across the river; those who do not can sit under the trees.

Evening
Dinner and overnight in Zhongwei, or - if the group prefers - in one of the desert camps beyond the dunes, where the sky after dark is the point.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a 4-star or equivalent hotel in Zhongwei, twin share, with daily breakfast. A desert camp or desert hotel can be substituted on request.

Morning - the goji fields
Ningxia grows most of China's goji, and the best of it comes from the strip around Zhongning, where the river silt, the altitude and the sun combine in a way that has been recognised for at least four hundred years - the fruit was a tribute item under the Ming. The plant is a woody shrub about two metres high; the berries hang in clusters and are picked by hand, one at a time, because they bruise.

You visit a working plantation with the family that runs it, walk the rows, and see the drying floors where the fruit is spread in the sun or run through a low-temperature dryer. July and August is the picking season and the fields are full; at other times you see the pruning, the trellis work and the drying. The guide translates, and the farmer will talk about the difference between the summer crop and the smaller autumn crop, and why the grade of the berry matters more than the size of the bag.

Lunch
Lunch with the family or at a local restaurant - lamb, free-range chicken, and a goji-leaf dish that is only available in season. Goji is used here as an ingredient, not a supplement: in soup, in the steamed chicken, and in the eight-treasure tea.

Afternoon - the river homestays
The Yellow River terraces south of Zhongwei have, in the last few years, been built over with a cluster of courtyard hotels - low, earth-coloured, built of rammed earth and timber in the local vernacular, arranged among the fruit trees and the irrigation channels. The point of them is the view and the quiet: the river below, the desert on the far bank, nothing else.

You spend the afternoon there. Walk the terraces, sit under the trees, take tea. It is deliberately not an activity.

Evening
Dinner at the homestay, cooked from what the kitchen gardens are producing. Overnight here if the group wants it, or back in Zhongwei.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Overnight at a courtyard homestay on the Yellow River terraces or at a 4-star hotel in Zhongwei, twin share, with daily breakfast.

Morning - the gorge
At Qingtongxia the Yellow River leaves the plain and enters a gorge cut through the Helan foothills, and the road runs along the rim of it. The water is wide and fast here, and the canyon walls are bare rock with a thin line of vegetation along the water.

The 108 Pagodas
On the west bank, on a slope that falls toward the river, 108 small Tibetan-style stupas are arranged in a triangle: one at the apex, then rows of three, five, seven and so on down to nineteen. The arrangement is deliberate - 108 is the number of beads on a Buddhist rosary and of the afflictions the practice is meant to clear - and the whole group is dated to the Western Xia period, which makes it one of the few surviving Tangut Buddhist monuments outside the tomb field.

The stupas are small, whitewashed, and each has a niche; the climb up the slope is by a stone stair and takes about twenty minutes. From the top the river, the gorge and the plain behind you all open out at once. A boat runs along the gorge from the site, which is the best way to see the canyon walls.

Lunch
Lunch at a riverside restaurant in Qingtongxia - river fish, lamb, and the local noodles.

Afternoon - departure
The drive to Yinchuan Hedong International Airport takes about an hour and a quarter from Qingtongxia. If your flight leaves late, the guide can add a stop at the Ningxia Museum or a last walk in the old city; a day room at a Yinchuan hotel can be kept on request so that you have somewhere to leave bags and shower.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
No hotel night included - onward flight or train. A further night in Yinchuan can be added on request.